Summary report and compilation of design challenges, design briefs, and wireframes in year 2

GREAT WP 2 Intervention Design has two main responsibilities in the project. Firstly, it ensures that the case studies carried out by the project address the real needs of policy makers and other policy stakeholders. Secondly, it collaborates with policy stakeholders and games providers to generate detailed effective designs for interventions and instruments. The completed designs are then implemented in WP3 by the game platforms participating in the project: the serious games platform DiBL from partner SGI, and the PlanetPlay app which can be embedded in commercial games to gather the views of large numbers of players. The present deliverable summarises the work carried out by WP2 during year two of the GREAT project. The GREAT project methodology defines a cycle with eight steps. The work of WP2 corresponds to the first three steps, whose purpose is as follows. · Step 1: Definition of what the case study will achieve and with who (a design challenge) · Step 2: Game activity concepts to address a policy dilemma (a design brief) · Step 3: Collaborative design of game-based activities (documented as wireframes) In year two of the project five case studies were active, and they completed 13 steps, each of which is described in the main body of the public deliverable. Additional documentation is available in Annex 1, Planning and Reporting Documents, and Annex 2, Supplementary Material. These annexes contain private and potentially sensitive information, and so they are confidential to the GREAT consortium and to the European Commission. The outputs of WP2 have been sufficient to facilitate the implementation of each case study. The work has also generated valuable information for future implementation, and insight into the project’s research lines. Step 1 started from the assumption that policymaking stakeholders needed to obtain information from citizens to inform decision making but had not yet articulated a specific dilemma, nor the way in which this should be done. This proved to be true for some policymaking stakeholders, but some already had a clear priority focus before starting work. Others had a more general need for information than had been anticipated, which could not easily be captured as a tightly focused dilemma. Based on our work in year 2, we distinguish four categories of policy stakeholder: policy legislator, policy enabler, policy implementer, and policy influencers. Each of these has their own priorities, capacities and constraints, in terms of the scope of their competence, their relationship with other bodies or social movements which may constrain their activities, and the open-ended nature of their required outcomes, and the variety of stakeholders which they contain. The results reported here suggest that these have a strong influence on the way that they engage with collaborative design activities. In step three it was found that distinction between the design of wireframes (within the scope of WP2) and implementation (WP3) was hard to maintain in practice, because the capabilities and constraints of the platform have a strong influence on design decisions. This led to more iteration than had been foreseen and highlighted the importance of facilitators having a strong high-level understanding of technical aspects of the systems for which designs are intended. Time constraints on some policymakers’ availability for collaborative design also led to iteration, and to shorter and more informal interactions between key participants, usually by email and videoconferencing. This also led GREAT staff to complement their facilitation role with a more consulting role, working with stakeholders and developers to identify and elicit the information which is required for the design of a successful games-based intervention. A crucial enabler was personal contact between GREAT and policy stakeholders. In particular, in the work with the PlanetPlay infrastructure, corporate, professional, and personal contacts were strongly leveraged in establishing the agreement of games studios to participate in the project. The publication and format of data was an important issue for policymakers, as the comparison of GREAT data from different countries, regions or sectors may be perceived as unflattering for some in terms of their policy awareness or implementation. Similarly, games studios recognised the benefits of obtaining new data about their players, but identified risks associated with inappropriate sharing of commercially valuable information. In both cases, the risks associated with GREAT data emerge from the fact that it is not constrained or regulated by traditional data management or editorial processes. This is the strength of GREAT, which enables it to access interesting new data, but it should be recognised that it carries with it concomitant risks, and that these need to be discussed openly and resolved with collaborating stakeholders at the design stage.